June 2011

06/14/2011

About us

We're Best Practical Solutions, a small software company located in Somerville, MA. We build software and sell support, training, consulting, and custom development. Our main product, RT (Request Tracker), is the premiere open source issue tracking system. We've been around since the fall of 2001 and are entirely self-funded. We're currently hard at work on our next new product. Things just keep getting busier.

About the job

We're looking for a Perl Hacker to help us enhance and refine our products, and help us be excellent to our customers. You'll be responsible for everything from implementing new features across all our products to testing and applying user-contributed patches to our released software. In a typical week, you'll probably spend about half your time working on customer projects and half working on internal and open source projects.

The hours are flexible and we all telecommute some of the time...though we work from our office in the heart of Davis Sq, Somerville, most days. We do just about EVERYTHING online and on the phone. You should be comfortable using email and instant messaging systems to collaborate and get work done.

About you

You should be a self-starter who has some experience with Perl, as well as a bit of experience with at least a few of the following:

Open source development practices

Distributed source control

Test driven development

User interface design

Documentation

Javascript

SQL databases

Optimization, profiling, and debugging

UNIX systems administration

It's okay if you don't know everything out of the gate, but you should be able to learn on the fly and be comfortable asking questions when you get in over your head. RT is a large codebase to dive into, so you should be prepared to work with a project that's too big to hold in your head at once. If you want to see what sort of trouble you're getting yourself into, you can find all of our open source code http://github.com/bestpractical/.

We're a small company and the boss is typically overextended. You should be comfortable working both independently and in small teams, prioritizing tasks on your own, and juggling tasks and projects.

Compensation

DOE - This is a full-time salaried position, but the details are negotiable. We're a small, self funded company. The standard benefits apply, of course: health insurance, dental insurance, and junk food to make that dental insurance worthwhile.

How to apply

Send something approximating a cover letter, and a resume in plain text, HTML or PDF, and a sample of some code you've written to resumes@bestpractical.com. If you're involved in open source development of one kind or another, please tell us about it. If you have a CPAN ID, tell us what it is. We won't consider applications without a code sample. We'll be paying particular attention to the readability, comments and tests.